Race, Waste, and Class: New Perspectives on Environmental Justice

Many of our readers may already be familiar with evidence suggesting that
residents of poor communities and in communities of color in the United
States bear a "disproportionate" burden of toxic contamination, both
through the generation and release of hazardous chemicals in their
neighborhoods, and via the location of waste management facilities. This
is an outcome that the landmark 1987 United Church of Christ (UCC) report
on toxic waste and race claimed was not the result of mere coincidence
(United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice, 1987). Indeed,
empirical evidence of disproportionate economic impact from environmental
mismanagement, as well as through the regulatory response to air pollution,
was already considered a decade earlier by geographers and economists,
albeit without the suggestion of discriminatory intent (e.g., Berry, et.
al., 1977; and Harrison, 1975).

In this special issue, our contributors consider both the evidence
supporting the conclusion that race is the central determining factor with
toxic exposure and, of greater consequence, they explore the political
implications of such for community organizing and empowerment. Addressing
the former agenda, a recent report by the U.S. Government Accounting Office
examines the racial composition and income level of people living near
municipal solid waste landfills and reviews research on the demographics of
hazardous waste facility location. It concludes that people of color and
low-income people are not over represented at nonhazardous municipal
landfills and, furthermore, that ten major studies on hazardous waste
facility location, including the UCC report, collectively yield an
inconclusive range of results depending upon the type of facility studied,
the research questions asked, the sample size used, the geographic
definition of the impacted community, and the research methods employed
(U.S. GAO, 1995. See also Perlin, et. al., 1995, on inconclusive data with
air emissions; and Mohai and Bryant, 1992, for a contending interpretation
of the existing research record suggesting race as the dominant predictor
for facility location).

Geography also matters. Whether one works in the rural South, where the
population is likely to be African American, in the Hispanic and Native
American regions of the Southwest, or in the Northeast, Midwest, and
Mountain States, where the rural population is mostly Caucasian, a
utilitarian approach to siting waste repositories would drive the facility
away from populated areas toward respective rural ethnic groups (c.f.,
Bullard 1990; and Gerrard, 1994, p. 90). The most recent major commercial
hazardous waste management sitings were a landfill in Adams County,
Colorado, and an incinerator at East Liverpool, Ohio, both with majority
Caucasian populations, while three of the largest hazardous waste
landfills, containing over forty percent of the total national permitted
commercial capacity, remain in just two African American communities
(Emelle, Alabama and Alsen, Louisiana), and one Hispanic community
(Kettleman City, California) (See United Church of Christ Commission for
Racial Jutice, 1987).

Our authors, however, are not bogged down with inconclusive demographic
evidence, nor by the trendy debates spawned, such as whether class or race
is a better predictor of hazardous waste facility siting; which came first,
the facility or the impacted population; and whether disproportionate
siting, when it does occur, results from true racism or mere market
efficiency (c.f., Anderton, et. al, 1994; Been, 1994; Bullard, 1994;
Hamilton, 1995; Mohai and Bryant, 1992; and Zimmerman, 1993). With ethnic
and class discrimination built into the very structure of our production
system, our authors recognize that people of color suffer the whole gamut
of capitalist contradiction through social and economic contradiction.
This is expressed through limited access to decent housing, health care,
food security, employment, and education (see also Feagin and Feagin,
1978). Our contributors thereby eclipse the determination of overt intent
as the principal measure for environmental discrimination and racism.
Moreover, they center on the lived experience of individual participants,
acknowledging the possibility of diminished response capacity among
low-income and minority communities to even resist toxic exposure or to
participate in pollution production decisions, whether or not the siting
burden itself is somehow disproportionate.

In addition to academic duties, many of us have been busy as participants
in, and advisors to, the grassroots movement for environmental justice.
This is an effort by local residents to gain some control over the many
attempts now underway to site hazardous and solid waste management
facilities in low-income and working-class communities, very often
communities of color. Here the local activists are moving away from
negotiation over a tightening of pollution emissions into their
communities, toward up-front pollution prevention and, by extension, toward
a challenge for control over the decision to pollute in the first place.
This is captured by a growing rejection of the NIMBY (or Not in My
Backyard) label and their embrace, ever more common, of a NIABY (or Not in
Anybody's Backyard) solidarity (Heiman, 1990). In short, and by explicit
extension, the grassroots movement for environmental justice represents a
populist challenge to exclusive private control of the production process
itself, for pollution prevention ultimately requires production control.

We begin with Benjamin Goldman's analysis of the environmental justice
movement, and his concern for its impact and future in this conservative
political era. Formerly Research Director for the Jobs and Environment
Campaign based in Boston, Massachusetts, Ben is in a unique position to
assess evidence for environmental discrimination as he was the original
data analyst for the UCC report, and has since authored many subsequent
assessments (e.g., Goldman, 1991; Goldman and Fitton, 1994).

Dr. Goldman clearly positions the environmental justice movement as arising
out of the anti-racist struggles of the Civil Rights Era, with many
participants drawing inspiration and employing tactics from the earlier
efforts. In this view, the environmental component commenced with the 1982
Warren County protest over the siting of a landfill for PCB- contaminated
soils in a predominantly African-American section of North Carolina. Here
over 500 were arrested for civil disobedience, including several of the
movement's subsequent leaders. This identification of the environmental
justice movement with the struggle against environmental racism is quite
common, particularly among academics and grassroots activists of color (see
Bullard, 1990; 1993; Lee, 1992; and Bryant and Mohai, 1992).

Few would deny that the anti-discrimination effort, often referred to as
the quest for environmental equity, has served to put the issue of
environmental justice on the map and garner public attention. However,
many grassroots leaders in rural white communities, also targeted for waste
repositories, argue that the environmental justice movement itself is
broader. This would move beyond the procedural and distributional equity
sought by civil rights activists in the anti- environmental discrimination
struggle to embrace a more general anti-toxins effort concerned with the
clean-up of abandoned waste sites, and now with the actual production and
use of hazardous chemicals. The broader anti-toxins effort first caught
public attention with the Love Canal (Niagara Falls, New York),
Stringfellow (Riverside, California), and Times Beach (Missouri) sites in
the late 1970s, specifically when hazardous synthetic byproducts first
associated with the Second World War effort and post-war industrial
expansion, began to bubble to the surface causing delayed public health
impacts. Widespread public attention was also furthered through the public
participation provisions of the National Environmental Policy Act (1970),
and via better access to industrial release information under the federal
Clean Air and Water acts (1970 and 1972), the Resource Conservation and
Recovery Act (1976), and eventually through the Community Right-to- Know
Act (SARA Title III) setting up the federal Toxic Release Inventory (TRI)
requiring storage and emission information from major manufacturers (1986).

The determination between environmental justice and environmental equity is
more than a matter of semantics. Should the quest for environmental
justice merely stop with an equitable distribution of negative
externalities, business could proceed as usual. This time it would be with
assurance from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other
regulatory agencies that we will all have an equal opportunity to be
polluted--or the flip side--protected from pollution, however
ineffectively. Such assurance comes complete with procedural guarantees
that we may participate in the equitable allocation of this pollution and
protection, if we so choose (e.g., Reilly, 1992). This is an outcome that
each of our authors, and most emphatically Ben himself, would challenge as
incomplete. As envisioned, environmental justice demands more than mere
exposure equity. It must incorporate democratic participation in the
production decision itself.

Ben successfully questions both the motivation and the procedure of various
projects now underway discrediting the suggestion that environmental
discrimination even occurs (e.g., Anderton, et. al, 1994; and Been, 1994).
Acknowledging that waste tends to flow toward communities with weak
response capacity, he furthermore warns that many of the well-intended
attempts to empower communities through on-line access to chemical (TRI)
release information, participation in local health risk assessments, and
through access to GIS mapping and overlay procedures, may actually further
disadvantage communities of color and low- income areas in the absence of
meaningful technical assistance. This can occur when wealthier
municipalities have the means to access these new tools to raise their
response capacity, bolster their fortifications, and keep the waste out.

Facing the new political reality, Ben moves on to suggest that the future
of environmental justice, however its genesis is conceived, now depends
upon whether the alienated white working- class majority responds to the
increasing economic and social pressures characteristic of the
globalization of capital with the racial prejudice and consumer desperation
courted by the Republican Right, or with the type of coalition building for
sustainable development and worker rights advocated by the Gardner-Greer
and Gottlieb-Fisher articles in this issue. His closing warning, that the
environmental justice movement's obsession with racism as the "linchpin to
environmental injustice" actually serves the polluter's attempt to
discredit the movement, leads us directly to Laura Pulido's thoughtful
analysis of the incomplete conceptualization of racism among participants
in the environmental justice dialogue.

A geographer based at the University of Southern California, Laura provides
an overview of the genesis of the anti-environmental racism effort. Laura
questions the very rationality of a debate where racism is reified as some
independent attribute that can be recognized through discrete overt actions
while ignoring both the ideology and the dynamic nature of its practice.
This important insight calls into question the entire corpus of recent work
that asks such static questions as whether race or income is a better
predictor of siting decisions, and which came first, the toxic victim or
the hazardous waste facility siting. As she notes, we must be aware of how
the legacy of racism operates, limiting life choices, while also denying
people the economic and political tools needed to challenge the
institutional mechanisms of racism (See also Feagin, and Feagin, 1978).

More significantly, as Laura suggests, we must not let powerful vested
production interests define the political agenda in an "either/ or" manner,
where we are given a choice of race or class discrimination, jobs or
environment, healthy bodies or economic development, take it or leave it.
We have here in Laura's contribution a timely and practical review of race
and racism as conceptualized by those involved with the dominant discourse.
This review finally moves us beyond the static "chicken or egg" debate to
question how inequality, in all of its forms, be it with race, class,
gender, or age, is socially constructed as a necessary feature of
capitalist production. Only with this insight in hand can we move on to
forge a multi-cultural and counter- hegemonic alliance.

The seeds of this critique of the dominant mode of production are already
emerging among activists associated with the Citizens Clearinghouse for
Hazardous Waste (CCHW), Greenpeace, the Southwest Network for Environmental
and Economic Justice, and with several other multi-ethnic and
gender-balanced umbrella outreach organizations, even when the grassroots
groups they represent are still class or racially homogeneous (see Citizens
Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste; and Environmental Research Foundation).

Professor Pulido is one of the few scholars to distinguish the anti-racist
struggle from a broader environmental justice movement. Once again, the
distinction is important, as there are several powerful political agenda
underway that serve select interests. Laura notes those vested interests
that deny racism in siting. Underscoring the political motivation behind
research, Laura also accepts the agenda of community activists who focus on
racism in their struggle, for the successful demonstration of such in
siting decisions strengthens the attack on racism in general, while helping
garner attention and material resources for the disempowered.

There may be, however, more afoot than even Laura acknowledges. On the one
hand, we do find Waste Management Inc., the largest waste handler in the
world, funding research suggesting that its industry is definitely not
racist with siting decisions. Indeed, the University of Massachusetts
scholars funded by Waste Management are so bold as to suggest that hosting
a toxic waste repository may provide benefits that balance out the negative
stigma attached (Anderton, et. al., 1994, p.125)! On the other hand, we
also find the EPA now admitting that, at least in the past, its siting and
regulatory decisions may have been inequitable (U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency, 1992). This confession sets the stage for the impartial
distribution of pollution. While many scholars and even activists buy into
this blurring of the environmental justice and the environmental equity
movements, we must be clear where the former, environmental justice, is
concerned about toxic use reduction thereby generating a radical NIABY
challenge to the very control of production decisions, while the latter,
the critique of environmental racism, tends to focus on more liberal
process and outcome equity in siting decisions. This is a theme Robert
Lake, a professor of geography with the Center for Urban Policy Research at
Rutgers University, turns to in his contribution.

Reviewing the literature on environmental equity, Bob astutely notes an
overemphasis with distributive justice, and an under-developed notion of
procedural justice. Assuming that the public only has the right to respond
to decisions that have already been made a priori by private interests and
public regulators, the latter, procedural justice, typically takes the form
of a well-worn liberal appeal to public participation, negotiation, and
compensation schemes. The result has been a static public policy that can
not move beyond cosmetic change in the distribution of environmental
problems across communities and dares not challenge control of the decision
to pollute, and thus produce, in the first instance.

As with Ben Goldman, who portrays the environmental justice movement as a
gnat on the back of a conservative elephant, Bob also paints a rather
pessimistic picture, where marginalized communities, once their equity
concerns are addressed, may be less interested in supporting a democratic
challenge to local investment and production decisions. Turning this
prognosis on its head, however, we have to question whether it is
reasonable to lay the burden for social challenge against the forces of
capitalist production at the feet of materially disadvantaged communities.
If the negative externalities of industrial production are now to be more
equitably distributed, we might instead find protest arising in wealthier
communities so targeted. Indeed, the modern environmental movement, at
least in its regulatory mode, can be traced to a middle-class awakening
that the pollutants of industrial production were no longer limited to
already- blighted, working- class, inner-city neighborhoods--a realization
arising from the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962)
documenting the ubiquitous spread of pesticides throughout everybody's food
chain. As anticipated from the basic contradiction for capitalism between
the social nature of production and its private appropriation, solutions
will be offered--such as the sanctity of residence space or "nature" as a
refuge from the forces of production--that can only be temporary given
necessary requirements for economic expansion. As such, revolutionary
consciousness may arise among those very classes that materially benefit
from the existing social structure of production, however long, drawn-out,
and painful in the interim this awakening may be (Heiman, 1988).

Professor Lake notes that we will not have eliminated environmental
inequity, let alone the process generating it, if well-intending regulatory
agencies just succeed in moving the waste around. As he demonstrates
though several case studies involving waste management proposals for
impoverished communities, procedural equity must encompass a process of
community empowerment leading to self-determination. This should include
full participation in prior decisions affecting the production of both the
costs, and the benefits, to be distributed. Thus Bob also leads us beyond
the static "chicken or egg" and market efficiency arguments, for if we
accept environmental equity (leading to environmental justice) as
self-determination, unencumbered by neighboring decisions, then even
without a disproportionate siting burden, we can still have inequality
occurring where there is a lack of such local control.

Bob lays before us a daunting challenge, to devise an institutional
structure through which the principle of self-determination occurs without
denying others their own path, as for example through the parochial
exclusion or the volunteerism that impact beyond municipal borders. We
might add that this quest is further complicated by questions of individual
rights and intra- community power relations, where designated
representation may no longer represent community values, a situation
particularly apparent on many Native American reservations and increasingly
common among communities fractured through threats to environmental health.

This organizing challenge is picked up by Berkeley geographer Florence
Gardner, and community organizer Simon Greer, both labor activists
currently working in South Carolina. As local organizers, Gardner and
Greer are concerned with building a broad, multi-racial and multi-issue
working-class alliance that challenges the hegemonic control of local
politics by vested production interests, while also providing a base for
broader, state-wide resistance to the dominant conservative agenda. They
appear to have found such a model in the Carolina Alliance for Fair
Employment (CAFE), a worker-controlled, multi-racial, and gender-balanced
umbrella organization that has had a stunning series of victories across
South Carolina with labor, housing, and environmental battles. As they
suggest, CAFE's success in no small measure lies with the ability to
provide a larger social structure for local struggles, a structure that
directly questions both the power and the ideology of ruling political and
economic elites so long dominant in the state.

The fact that CAFE is worker-based is not surprising, given the legacy of
racial segregation with residence in the South, and the generally higher
levels of integration in the workplace. Much of the environmental movement
has been residence-based, with activists mobilized by perceived threats to
their place of residence or, if you will, their space for consumption and
reproduction. CAFE, on the other hand, provides a model where social and
ethnic barriers, long the bane of community organizing, can be overcome
through reference to the workplace experience, even as the agenda reaches
to such consumption issues as housing access and, in the case before us,
recreational opportunities. The Highlander Center based in New Market,
Tennessee, Los Angeles' Labor/Community Strategy Center, New York State's
Labor & Environment Network, and the Southern Appalachian Labor School in
West Virginia, provide other well-known models for worker-centered,
multi-issue, and socially balanced organizing in racially segregated regions.

As with Ben Goldman, Gardner and Greer take aim at the conservative
right-wing agenda currently sweeping the nation. While the ideology
spawned tends to further environmental discrimination, with its support for
a devolution of regulatory power to the states, deemphasis on affirmative
action, and support for private property rights (or at least those of
production interests), we must remember that capital interests are not
unified in their support for this political agenda. Indeed, large-scale
capital interests active across many states and regions have already raised
concerns, as evident through numerous editorials in Business Week and other
popular mouthpieces for liberal capital concerns. It is just these multi-
locational interests that are most prone to accept the environmental
discrimination argument, as they seek to locate wherever the political and
social climate has been prepared though fair-share arguments. The
appropriate response then, by toxic victims and the working class, would be
to recapture and steer the populist alienation and backlash toward
progressive community empowerment at the local level, while building a
critique of the pernicious parochialism of the conservative agenda. As
significant, these groups must also challenge the liberal ideology at the
national and international levels through reference to toxic use reduction
and democratic participation in production decisions, and avoid collusion
over fair-share allocation of the negative externalities generated. The
Labor/Community Strategy Center, and CAFE in South Carolina, provide just
such models, linking production with consumption concerns and avoiding the
"either/ or" choices that compromise a progressive agenda.

Robert Gottlieb and Andrew Fisher, both with the Urban Planning Program at
UCLA, provide another model for community empowerment, this time with the
production of a safe and sustainable food supply. Like Gardner and Greer,
Gottlieb and Fisher also demonstrate that the struggle for environmental
justice is not isolated, but rather is tied in with daily quality of life
issues, such as access to housing, health, recreation, and food. They
provide an example from South Central Los Angeles, where the community
group active against the proposed siting of a solid waste incinerator
successfully managed to broaden the agenda to consider local economic and
social development (see also Blumberg and Gottlieb, 1989). This broadening
is common with "garbage wars," for the struggle against landfills and
incinerators leads many to consider labor-intensive recycling alternatives.
On the other coast, in Brooklyn's Williamsburg/Greenpoint neighborhood and
in the South Bronx, in Northeast Philadelphia, and elsewhere, community
activists have also moved the anti-incinerator agenda to consider
recycling, sustainable "green industries," and now community open-space and
gardening programs (e.g., New York City, Department of Environmental
Protection, n.d.; Lewis, et. al, 1992; and Center for Neighborhood
Technology)

As Bob and Andrew suggest, the food security movement is tied in with the
entire web of human existence, incorporating household income, family
farming, transportation, commodity markets, food safety (especially from
pesticide poisoning), urban greening, and international trade agenda. They
note that organized environmental justice groups have, as yet, not played a
major role in the various food and farm bills before Congress. While this
absence is due, in part, to the many divisions within the food security
agenda--such as between urban consumers and rural farmers over prices and
labor practices--and to a basic lack of faith in federal Beltway politics
by grassroots activists, Bob and Andrew go further to recommend that food
security serve as the organizing principle for a reinvigorated grassroots
effort at sustainable development.

The food security movement promises a more comprehensive geographic
awareness for participants as they challenge the national, and now
international, trade in food products and the spread of pernicious labor
practices. It might, however, better compliment, rather than replace, an
emerging "green industries" initiative now common in many urban areas as a
response to the forced choice between jobs and environment, or over local
waste siting proposals (See Lewis, et. al., 1992; and Center for
Neighborhood Technology). Combining the two, food security and green
industries, the former can help to uncover cases where a so-called "green"
industry is actually contaminating the local food supply and threatening
public health (e.g., recycling is not an unqualified "good"), while the
latter, in the form of farmer's markets tied to local food processing
facilities, certainly furthers the green agenda for economic and
environmental sustainability. In this process, access to shelter, health
care, and job security are other necessary, and complimentary, goals.

So, in the final analysis, this issue's contributors agree that the central
issue for environmental justice involves community empowerment to further
access to resources necessary to take an active role in decisions affecting
one's life. In addition to participation in production decisions, this
would include community responsibility for basic environmental monitoring
and health surveys (Heiman, 1995). In this process, we must keep in mind
that the common-sense knowledge about environmental equity, conflict
resolution, fair-share allocation, negotiated settlement, and the other
blandishments of the liberal reform effort tend to support the status quo,
where officially sanctioned knowledge in a class-stratified society serves
vested interests. Our goal then is to document and support an alternative
base of knowledge among the lived experience of oppressed people residing
and working among the toxic contamination of industrial society. If we
settle for liberal procedural and distributional equity, relying upon
negotiation, mitigation, and fair-share allocation to address some sort of
"disproportional" impact, we merely perpetuate the current production
system that by its very structure is discriminatory and non- sustainable.

The road ahead will not be easy with the globalization of capital hindering
solidarity and union formation, and a new conservative political climate
giving corporate polluters the upper hand. Many of the national umbrella
coalitions serving the grassroots groups are also downsizing for lack of
funds (e.g., the Jobs and Environment Campaign, CCHW, and Greenpeace).
Nevertheless the inherent contradiction for capitalism, one demanding
structural change, will not go away. Ever more poor and working-class
people are waking up to the realization that the current production process
no longer serves their needs. In this climate there is no substitute for
basic organizing as the best way to challenge corporate hegemony. The
authors in this special issue provide abundant evidence for the wisdom of
the alternative path.

Bullard, R. (1994) A new "chicken-or-egg" debate: Which came first--The
neighborhood, or the toxic dump? The Workbook (Published by the Southwest
Research and Information Center, Albuquerque, NM) 19(2): 60-62.

Heiman, M. (1995) Science by the people!: Grassroots environmental
monitoring and the debate over scientific expertise. Paper presented at the
91st Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, March
14-19, 1995, Chicago, IL.

Lee, C. (1992) Toxic waste and race in the United States. In B. Bryant and
P. Mohai (Eds.) Race and
the Incidence of Environmental Hazards: A Time for Discourse . Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, pp. 10-27

Lewis, S., et. al. (1992) The Good Neighbor Handbook . Acton, MA: The Good
Neighbor Project of the Center for the Study of Public Policy.

Mohai, P., and B. Bryant (1992) Environmental injustice: Weighing race and
class as factors in the distribution of environmental hazards. University
of Colorado Law Review 63(1): 921-932.

United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice (1987) Toxic Wastes
and Race in the United
States: A National Report on the Racial and Socio-Economic Characteristics
of Communities with Hazardous Waste Sites. New York: United Church of
Christ Commission for Racial Justice.